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When negotiating a given agreement, one is often faced with the challenge of balancing a client’s budget, licensing requirements, and intended use. As you have no doubt experienced, those three don’t often align. And just about as often, the client is resolute on the terms and unwilling to budge on any of those points.

While the photographer primarily shot lifestyle projects, he had a relationship with a brand from earlier in his career that approached him for a seemingly simple portraiture project. The company had a large roster of consultants around the country that they hoped to photograph individually at a four-day seminar.

The photographer had a longstanding relationship with an architectural firm who was working with the client to develop new office spaces, and they connected the photographer directly to the client to discuss the creation of artwork to fill the new space.

The automotive manufacturer had a well-established group of brand enthusiasts across the country that they planned to photograph with their cars, and the agency hoped to capture at least six of them that were local to the photographer, with the possibility of photographing two more in a location that would require a bit of travel.

I recently worked with a Northeast-based photographer to estimate a small corporate portrait shoot. The client wanted individual portraits of three of their employees and one group shot of all three together. All four shots would be captured against the same seamless background. And the requested usage was limited - the licensing would be restricted to use in the Client’s 2017 corporate sustainability report.

I wanted to take this opportunity to make the case, yet again, for limiting licensing. As many of you have surely experienced, clients are increasingly expecting unlimited use, by default, regardless of the intended use. Nevertheless, it is important to press against that default request whenever you face it.

The client, a relatively new player in the mobile app space, came to us for a shoot focused on two people using their app and accompanying accessories on various mobile devices within a house, and environmental still life images.

A southeast-based portrait photographer came to us looking for assistance pricing a stock licensing agreement for a large corporation interested in using three existing images on the .org website of their philanthropic division.

The concept was straightforward: the agency/client hoped to photograph three women of a specific demographic individually against a white background. The agency was redesigning a website for a new drug the pharmaceutical company was manufacturing, and while this would be the main use for the images, they also had plans to run a few consumer-facing print ads over the course of two years.

This was the third time in as many years that the client approached the photographer to create images of newly opened retail locations. In this case, I found out that while the client requested unlimited use of 12 images for one year, their intended use mainly included one image for local advertising use that would likely be minimal, while the other images would end up on the client’s website to showcase the new retail location.